Red Alert Read online

  “Into what?” I asked. “Ten minutes ago, Shelley called us and said it was an armed robbery. Now it’s a noncrime, and you sent the troops packing. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” Reitzfeld said.

  “Bob, someone made a 911 call. This isn’t like the old days. They follow up on this shit.”

  “Relax, Zach. Nine one one got a call that a man was tied to a pipe in the stairwell. I told the cops it was a misunderstanding: the guy who phoned it in didn’t realize Shelley is a film producer and we were shooting a movie.”

  “And they believed that?”

  “No, it’s complete horseshit. But when their CO asks why they walked away without taking a report, they’ll have an answer that will fly.”

  “In that case, thank you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For lying. Kylie was about to do the same thing, but she can’t get away with it. You can.”

  “I hated lying to them, but Shelley’s in there with a suite full of high rollers, none of whom would think twice about losing a hundred grand, but all of whom would be very unhappy to see this little incident spin out on social media.”

  “You want to tell us what really went down?” I said. “We’re off the clock, and we’re here as friends, one of whom was willing to throw herself under the bus for Shelley.”

  “What do you know so far?”

  “Shelley said something about two armed men, an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar haul, and his head of security trussed up like a Christmas goose, but I don’t believe he used the phrase little incident.”

  Reitzfeld laughed. “The old man hosts a one-hundred-thousand-dollar buy-in game every other week. Same cast of characters, about a dozen, all told, but they rotate. He always rents the same two adjoining suites. One is for the game; the other is the losers’ lounge. We have hot and cold running room service, but they never get in the room with the players—or the money. I’m posted outside both doors. Cushy gig. Never had a problem.”

  “What happened tonight?”

  “I see this blind man feeling his way down the hallway with a cane, and as he gets closer, my instincts kicked in. Why is a blind guy wearing an Apple Watch? So I stand up, square off, and then…I never saw the second guy. He must have come through the fire exit behind me. Before I knew it, he had the chloroform rag over my face, and when I came to, I was in the stairwell, my hands zip-tied to a water pipe and my mouth duct-taped.”

  “Could you ID him?” Kylie asked.

  “No, but he’s sloppy—I made him from thirty feet away. Amateurs can get lucky, but they don’t get smart, and I’ll bet that somewhere there’s a couple of mooks with loose lips tossing around cash like Floyd Mayweather. I’ll find them.”

  “We have some good people working the streets,” Kylie said. “We can help you get the word out.”

  “No thanks. Much appreciated, but you’re not invited, and if you’ve got a problem with that, talk to the boss. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Reitzfeld opened the door for us. I was about to walk in when Kylie grabbed me by the elbow and whispered in my ear. “Don’t say anything.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “I’ll explain later,” she said, the whisper even more urgent. “Just be cool, and don’t say anything about anything.”

  “Vow of silence,” I said, and I mimed zipping my lips.

  We entered the suite. One look around the room, and I understood why Shelley wanted to keep the robbery under wraps. Most of the poker players were familiar faces. I recognized a retired NBA player turned ESPN commentator, a stand-up comic, a director, an actor, and an aging rock legend. There was another man sitting on a sofa at the far side of the room with a cell phone to his ear, but I’d never seen him before.

  As soon as we walked in, Shelley Trager, a sixty-year-old bundle of kinetic energy with a receding hairline and an expanding waistline, came bounding toward us, wrapped his arms around Kylie, and planted a big kiss on her cheek. Shelley is a film producer and a studio overlord, but he’s not one of those Hollywood air kissers. Shelley is Big Apple to the core, so the smooch was pure New York: loud and genuine.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said.

  “You call; we come,” Kylie said. “Any day, any time.”

  “And I couldn’t have picked a worse day or a worse time. I know how busy you are with those bombings. Plus I heard you’re working on the Davenport murder. By comparison, this is small potatoes.”

  “Maybe so,” a voice said, “but a hundred thousand bucks’ worth of small potatoes still adds up to a lot of fucking spuds.” It was Rick Button, the comic. He was sitting at the bar. “I came here figuring I’d lose a hundred grand tonight. I just didn’t expect to be cleaned out so fast. But those guys had guns, and I could tell they weren’t bluffing.”

  “You want your money back, Rick?” Shelley said. “I’ll write you a check.”

  “I don’t need your money. I could write this whole crazy poker game into my act and make a fortune.”

  “You do that, and you’ll be dead before you can spend a dime,” Shelley said. “And my two friends here will have seven suspects.”

  Kylie put a hand on Shelley’s arm. “I realize you guys have the ability to joke about this,” she said, “but there are two armed robbers walking around the city thinking they’re the baddest asses in town, and they’re not going to quit while they’re ahead. They’re going to do it again, and the next time, the outcome might not be something to laugh about. Are you sure you won’t reconsider reporting this to NYPD?”

  “I can’t,” Shelley said. “Do you see the guy on the couch talking on the phone? His name is Eitan Ben David. Doctor Eitan Ben David, plastic surgeon to the rich and wrinkled. If you think these show business assholes would be embarrassed for this to get out, imagine how a respectable citizen like Eitan would feel. Look, you guys did your job. You ran right over, and you stopped the cops from making a federal case out of this.”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Kylie said. “By the time Zach and I got here, Reitzfeld had it under control.”

  “Then it’s over and done with.”

  “Shelley, it’s not over and done with. Bob Reitzfeld is going to go after these guys, and he’s a damn good cop with a lot of resources at his disposal, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he caught them. Then what? You can farm out the police work, but once these felons are apprehended, they still have to be prosecuted through the city’s criminal justice system.”

  “I know, but that can happen quietly. No hoopla, no newspapers, no other victims besides me, and no trial, because we’ll make it worth their while to cop a plea.”

  “And maybe you’ll get your money back.”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “First, to do what you want: get these bastards off the streets. And second, to do what Reitzfeld wants: get even with the two punks who snookered him.”

  Kylie shrugged. “Two noble goals. Call if you need our help.”

  “Thank you both for coming,” Shelley said. “One question before you go. Have you heard from Spence?”

  Kylie shook her head. “Not a word. You?”

  “Nothing.”

  The door to the adjoining suite opened, and a man entered, carrying a plate of shrimp and a beer. He saw us talking to Shelley, put his food and drink on a table, threw his arms up in the air, and yelled, “Kylie!”

  He headed straight toward her, took her in his arms, and kissed her. This was a far cry from the father-figure, happy-to-see-you kiss Shelley had given her. This was a full-on mouth kiss that could easily have escalated into something a lot more passionate if there hadn’t been eight other men in the room.

  Quick-witted detective that I am, I immediately figured out two things.

  One: I now knew what Kylie meant when she said “Don’t say anything.”

  Two: I was about to meet Kylie’s
new boyfriend.

  CHAPTER 24

  His name was C. J. Berringer. Kylie knew, of course, that he’d be at the poker game, which is why she offered to drop me off at home and spare me the tedium of an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar nonevent.

  Failing that, she got me to promise not to say anything about anything, a promise I kept until she was forced to introduce me to C.J.

  “I can’t believe I finally get to meet Kylie’s partner,” he said, pumping my arm and acting like he was as thrilled to see me as he was to see his girlfriend.

  I sized him up: about my age, slightly taller, and annoyingly handsome. He was also a talker, and for the next ten minutes, which I could only hope were excruciating for Kylie, he bent my ear.

  He was born in Hawaii to a native Hawaiian mother and a white father. He struggled through his freshman year in college because he spent more time playing cards than cracking books. And then he had an epiphany: who needs college? He dropped out and carved out a life for himself as a professional gambler.

  He asked me if Kylie had told me how they met. Why no, she hadn’t. He was happy to fill me in.

  “It was a few weeks after her husband…” He didn’t finish the sentence. I guess I was supposed to fill in the blank. Flew the coop? Took a hike? Dropped her like a hand grenade?

  “Anyway,” he said, “she hopped a plane down to the Bahamas for a quick getaway. I was going down there for a blackjack tournament. We were on the same flight, but we didn’t meet until the baggage carousel. Then we split a cab to the Atlantis. I couldn’t believe it when she told me she was Five-O. I didn’t think cops could be that…I mean, look at her. Anyway, I lost fifty K, but it was the luckiest weekend of my life. After that…well…” He gave me another blank to fill in.

  “Great story,” I lied. “How do you know Shelley?”

  “Kylie introduced us. She told me she had a friend who hosted a biweekly Texas Hold’em game, and she got me an invite. This is only my third time here. The other two times I got played under the table by a plastic surgeon.”

  Knowing Kylie, I figured she hadn’t told him anything about our past. And then he said, “Enough about me. I want to hear all about you. Come on over to the losers’ lounge, and let’s throw down a few drinks.”

  The losers’ lounge. Of course she had told him, and now the fucker was sticking it to me.

  “Another time,” I said, looking at my watch. “I’ve got to get back home and shoot the cat.”

  He stared at me, dark eyes curious, a bright white smile and a crown of black hair on a copper canvas.

  “I have a diabetic cat,” I said. “I’ve got to give him an insulin shot every twelve hours.”

  “Ah, shoot the cat,” he said. “Cop talk. Funny.”

  I left him laughing.

  My apartment was only two blocks east. I walked slowly, but my mind was racing.

  I understood why Shelley didn’t want NYPD to investigate the robbery. It’s not just the publicity. There’d be interviews, digging into the private lives of the victims, and then if there was an arrest, there would be depositions, subpoenas, a trial. It was far too time-consuming for these high rollers. Like the comic said: he had expected to lose the money anyway, so why get tied up in a criminal investigation?

  And yet the criminal investigator in me couldn’t let it go.

  The details of Shelley’s high-stakes poker games are a well-kept secret. It’s by invitation only. Reitzfeld said the two guys with guns were amateurs. So how did they know where and when the game was being held? And how did they know to sneak up on Reitzfeld from behind?

  I knew the answer in two words: inside job.

  Someone on the inside tipped them off. It could have been someone at the hotel—a manager, a reservation clerk, a room service waiter—or it could have been someone at the table.

  According to Reitzfeld, most of the players were regulars. Same cast of characters, he said. About a dozen all told, but they rotate. But there was one new guy, an engaging rogue who had lost a hundred grand to the plastic surgeon in his first two sit-downs at the table. C. J. Berringer.

  I got to the corner of 77th and Lexington and looked up at my apartment building. I was in no hurry to get home. It’s not like I had a cat to take care of.

  I began walking south on Lex. The precinct was only ten blocks away. I knew Shelley wanted NYPD to back off, but it was too late. I already had a prime suspect, and I wanted to sit down in front of a department computer terminal and do some digging.

  For starters, I wanted to know what the C.J. stood for.

  PART TWO

  THE BANGKOK HILTON

  CHAPTER 25

  There was fresh hot coffee in the break room. I took that as a positive omen, poured myself a cup, and logged on to the Interstate Identification Index, a catalog of criminal histories in the U.S. If C. J. Berringer had a rap sheet, it would pop up on Triple Eye. It didn’t.

  I tried two other law enforcement databases. No luck. Either he wasn’t a crook or he hadn’t been caught yet.

  “You can run, C.J.,” I said as I booted up the LexisNexis Accurint Virtual Crime Center, “but you can’t hide.” I dove into the bottomless pit of public and not-so-public records, and there he was—Clyde Jerome Berringer, a Hawaiian-born college dropout who traveled the world playing cards. He had an excellent credit rating, impressive reported earnings, and no criminal history.

  But I did find something almost as damning. Clyde Jerome was married.

  My first instinct was to pick up the phone and tell Kylie. My second instinct was to play out that phone call in my head. Hey, Kylie, you’ll never guess what I stumbled on when I was running your boyfriend’s name through the system to see if I could find something that would put him behind bars.

  I needed a better plan. Normally when I’m confronted by challenging interpersonal situations like this, I go to Cheryl for advice. But telling my new girlfriend that I felt compelled to investigate my old girlfriend’s new boyfriend had all the earmarks of a bad soap opera where the Zach character winds up losing his new girlfriend, his old girlfriend, and his balls.

  My motives for digging into C.J.’s past may not have been pure, but now that I knew the truth, someone had to tell Kylie that her handsome gambler was gambling on the fact that she’d never find out about Nalani, his wife of seven years, who lived five thousand miles away in Honolulu.

  And I knew just the someone who could do it.

  The next morning at 5:45, I arrived at Gerri’s Diner. The sign on the door says NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE. There should be a second sign that says NO BOUNDARIES, because as soon as you walk through that door, your private life belongs to Gerri Gomperts.

  She’s one part short-order cook and one part Internal Affairs. The difference between Gerri and IA is that cops are happy to share their deepest, darkest secrets with her.

  “Good morning, Zachary,” she said. “What’ll you have this morning?”

  “Greek omelet, rye toast, coffee, and five minutes of your time.”

  “Would you like to sit at the counter, or would you like a private confessional in the back?”

  I smiled and found a quiet booth at the rear of the diner.

  “I see you made an arrest in the Davenport case,” she said when she delivered the food. “But that’s probably not what you want to talk about.”

  She sat down across from me, and in between bites of my breakfast, I gave her the highlights of last night, starting with the phone call from Shelley and ending with what I had learned about C.J.

  She didn’t blink.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” I asked.

  “What’s the question?”

  “Someone should tell Kylie that the guy she’s dating is married. I can’t do it, so I thought maybe—”

  “She already knows he’s married, Zach. She told me a week ago.”

  “She…she told you?”

  “You think you’re the only cop who comes to me for relationship a
dvice? That week before Valentine’s Day I have to open up early and close late just to handle the seasonal demand.”

  “And she doesn’t care that she’s sleeping with a married man?”

  “In case you forgot, Kylie is married, too. She doesn’t live with her husband, and C.J. doesn’t live with his wife. Consenting adults, Zach. Let it go.”

  “I could use some more coffee,” I said.

  “And a side order of antipsychotic drugs,” she said. “Why the hell are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Trying to solve a crime that isn’t your crime to solve. Or maybe you’re just trying to prove to Kylie that she’s making the same mistake all over again by picking some jerk whose name is Not Zach Jordan.”

  “Forget the coffee,” I said. “I’ll just take the check.”

  She leaned across the table and put her hand on mine. “That’s what I love about you, Zach. You’re always so open to good advice…until you hear it.”

  She stood up. “Breakfast is on me.”

  “Thanks…for everything.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yeah. Don’t give up on me.”

  “Don’t worry, kiddo,” she said. “I love a challenge. Stay where you are. I’ll bring you some more coffee.”

  She headed back toward the kitchen, and I checked my watch: 6:05. Kylie would be in by 6:15. I had time for one more cup before we tackled another impossibly long day.

  “Just wait right here,” I heard Gerri say from the front of the diner. I looked up, and she was headed straight for me. No coffee. All business.

  “Zach, someone up front is looking for you,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Never saw him before. Civilian. Overweight. Jumpy as grease on a griddle. Smells like a cigar factory. Do you know him?”

  “Hell, yeah. Send him back.”

  A few seconds later, Nathan Hirsch, the happily married dad from Queens with the high-priced hooker in Jersey, loomed over me.